The Last Man

This story is set five years after The Wrack. As an important note, the avalanche responses shown by the characters in this story are NOT best practice in our own world.

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It was three days after the avalanche that the gem merchants realized they were all going to die.

They had numbered eleven at the start of their trip. Their seer, a first-timer, had gotten caught up in a matter of Singer law, and the outcome had proven fatal. It hadn’t been a great surprise— the young man had been arrogant and overconfident, even on his first trip to Singer lands. The twelvescore and twelve musical laws of the Singers were beautiful to hear, but harsh and uncompromising in practice.

The Singers did, at least, have the mercy carve the young man’s name into one of their great memorial walls. They were a harsh, severe people, but an honorable one, and they would not let even their enemies or criminals go forgotten by the ancestors. Only the very worst of traitors had their names left uncarved in their memorial walls, for there was no worse fate to any Eidola than to go forgotten by the ancestors, to have their names unrecorded. Whether north or south of the Krannenbergs, only the most miserable of wretches would not record the names of the dead.

The remaining ten hadn’t protested or tried to save the arrogant young fool. They had offered him ample warnings. Perhaps if trade hadn’t been closed these past years, the stories would have loomed larger in his mind, but this was the first trade season the Singers and the Fervent had been at peace since the waning days of the Wrack.

The new Fervent rulers of Lothain had survived the years of testing raids by the Singers, though, and earned their grudging respect. And, when spring grew far enough along after the Singer ambassador sang peace, the gem merchants eagerly resumed their profitable trades.

The ten surviving merchants made a fortune selling uncut southern gems in Singer lands— and promptly spent all their earnings on cut Singer gems. The Singers were some of the most skilled gem-cutters on the continent, and they had more plentiful tourmalines, nephrite jade, and even the occasional emerald. In turn, they craved citrine, spinels, and even, oddly enough, diamond. No one quite knew why the Singers wanted so many diamonds for their seers— they were incredibly difficult to work, and only really useful for broad-scale surveying of the spirit world, for semaphore construction and research.

Southern gem merchants were happy to buy the relatively cheap gem and sell it at a handsome profit up north.

The passes through the Krannenbergs were perilous year-round— branching, twisting things that offered dozens of routes through, none of them actually good. In normal times, the gem merchants would carefully map their routes and share knowledge of their paths with their mercantile allies— but none of the routes had been scouted in years, with the war. The merchants this year were going in largely blind.

They could have gone back the route they’d followed to the Singer lands, but they decided to scout a new route— partially as a favor to other merchants, and partially because their first route had crossed over the snowfields atop a glacier, a route that was not safe without a seer to peer through the snowpack to look for crevasses.

Perhaps, if their fool seer hadn’t gotten himself killed, he could have spotted the weakness in the snow on the mountain above. Perhaps not.

Five of them managed the sprint to the lee of a great outcrop of rock. Five of them were either strong enough, close enough, or smart enough to drop their heavy packs to reach the lee.

The other five vanished in a deafening roar of white. If they were lucky, their deaths had been swift. If they were unlucky, the snow had killed them through suffocation.

The first thing the survivors did, after the snow cloud settled and taking stock of their situation, was to begin arguing.

Not over blame— none knew what noise had triggered the avalanche, and they were not fool enough to blame one another. They still believed they had a chance to live, then, and knew their survival would depend on one another.

No, they argued over how long to wait to carve the names of the dead, because it was a sin to carve a name before its bearer had passed into the spirit world.

By the time they finished their argument, it was moot. An hour had passed, and there was no hope for any survivors breaking free. 

They carved the names of the dead into the stone using some of their surviving jeweler’s tools, then settled down to wait.

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The gem merchants and other travelers of the mountain passes had long since codified rules for surviving the journey, and many of them had to do with avalanches.

There was a prescribed day to wait before attempting a crossing of avalanche snow, without a seer. With a seer, at least one with the correct eye gems, you could attempt it immediately, even make rescue attempts if the seer could detect anyone buried.

Without a seer to peer through the physical world, however, doing either was pure foolishness. Best to wait for the slope to settle fully once more.

On the second day, they ventured out cautiously prodding at the snow to check that each and every step was safe before they moved their foot forward. A few hours into the day, they found one of their discarded packs, caught on a smaller rock outcrop. Though the recovered gems were a blessing from the ancestors, the recovered food and other supplies were a far greater one.

By the end of the day, they still hadn’t found a safe route forward or back across the snow, but their hopes were high.

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It was in the early afternoon of the third day that the eldest member of their party stepped off the cliff.

It was no accident, was clearly suicide, and the others immediately understood what it meant, despite the fact the eldest hadn’t said anything to them.

He’d given up hope that they’d ever escape or find a path, and had decided to make absolute sure that his name would be carved into the stone, that he wouldn’t end up as the sole survivor, with no one to carve his name into the rock outcrop.

His family, back in the lowlands of Lothain, likely would have had his name carved into one of the memorial obelisks of their town once it was clear he’d been gone too long, but who knew if that would be soon enough for his soul to be carried to the ancestors?

It was clear he didn’t want to take that risk.

The four survivors cursed his name as they carved it into the rock wall— for, though his act had been a deeply selfish and cruel one, they would not abandon their religious duty.

They swore an oath to one another then, that they would not carve the names of further suicide victims onto the rock outcrop. If anyone else was to abandon them, they would suffer the consequences.

Such an oath was borderline heretical— but not fully over that line of heresy.

Three of them swore that oath willingly, one begrudgingly. Not because he was contemplating the eldest’s path, but because he refused to believe they were trapped, that the path was truly gone. 

The others didn’t try too hard to convince him otherwise. All of them privately imagined that his drive to live might guarantee that their own names would be inscribed.

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The next morning, the four were three.

All of the merchants could appraise gems, but their most skilled appraiser had a true gift for it. Whenever there was any doubt about a stone, they came to him.

And on the morning of the fourth day, he was gone. Not to suicide, but to murder with a knife, a smile on his corpse.

And his name carved in the wall.

All knew it was an act of mercy, but none knew which had done it. None save the murderer knew which had done it, which had killed the appraiser. There were suspicions voiced, of course— most prominently, that the appraiser had kept a lover among their number. The man’s tastes were well known, after all. None had any suspicion who it might have been, though.

So they waited, and eyed each other in suspicion and jealousy, that they had not been offered the knife’s mercy. And one of them, presumably, held guilt in his heart for not offering it.

All of them knew it to be a truly heretical act, one that should have earned its perpetrator oblivion, stripped them of the right to have their own name carved.

But none of them wished to be forgotten by the ancestors, so none of them spoke. None of them would risk estranging a man who could carve their own name for them.

So they watched, and they waited.

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The fifth day came, and they watched each other, and waited. The hopeful one spent much of the day searching the path of the avalanche for a safe route forward or back, but the other two knew it was hopeless. The avalanche had ripped apart the path, sent its rocks plummeting down the cliff to their side.

The other two sat in the lee of the stone outcrop, marked with seven names, and waited. 

One man began eating and drinking freely from their supplies, knowing it did not matter, that there was no reason not to indulge himself gluttonously, one last time.

The other refused to touch any food or wine, clearly hoping to hasten his own death, and drinking only a little snowmelt water. If he hadn’t sworn the vow against suicide, he likely wouldn’t have even done that much.

And the hopeful man searched and searched for a path out.

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On the seventh day after the avalanche, the hopeful man fought with the glutton, coming close to yelling over the waste of supplies. It was not until the fasting man intervened that the argument ceased— for none of them trusted the slope above them entirely. Most of the snow had surely been carried down by the avalanche already, but that didn’t mean all of it.

And the rest of that day, the glutton and the fasting man watched each other and waited, while the hopeful man kept up his search. It was halfhearted, his supply of hope clearly beginning to dry up.

On the eighth day after the avalanche, the glutton and the fasting man watched one another and waited, while the hopeful man kept up his search.

And then the hopeful man took a risk he should have known better than, tried crossing a stretch of snow too close to the cliff, and three became two.

The glutton and the fasting man simply stared at the empty space where the hopeful man should have been for a time, and then the glutton wept. The fasting man said nothing at all.

They carved the hopeful man’s name into the stone outcrop.

And on the ninth day after the avalanche, the glutton and the fasting man watched one another and waited. It was hard to call the first man a glutton any longer, though, for the supplies had finally run out.

They didn’t say anything to one another.

After all, there was nothing to be said.

There would only be one more name carved on the stone outcrop.

The two men watched one another and waited.